Here's where I read it. If you doubt any of the statements below, I strongly suggest that you contact Russ' staff. They will provide you with more details upon request.

http://feingold.senate.gov/~feingold/releases/02/03/2002314A05.html

I also have concerns about a two different ethical issues that arose during the consideration of his confirmation. I questioned him about one such issue at the hearing last month. After his first hearing, Judge Pickering asked a number of lawyers who practice before him to submit letters of recommendation. He asked them to send those letters to his chambers so that he could fax them to Washington. And he testified that he read the letters before forwarding them to the Justice Department, which sent them on to the Committee. Now when I asked Judge Pickering about this, he seemed confused by the questions, as if he thought I was objecting to the fact that the letters had been faxed rather than mailed. Let me be clear, I have no problem with faxes. My office gets them all the time. What I do have a problem with is a sitting federal judge asking lawyers who practice before him to send letters supporting his nomination to a higher court, and having those letters sent to him rather than directly to the Justice Department or the Senate. There seems to me to be a significant ethical problem here.

I asked Professor Stephen Gillers of NYU Law School, one of the leading experts on legal and judicial ethics in the country, for his views on this issue. Professor Gillers responded in a letter to me that I submitted to the Chairman and the Ranking Republican Member for inclusion in the record. He confirmed my concern about Judge Pickering's actions. Let me read a portion of that letter. Professor Gillers wrote:

It was improper for Judge Pickering to solicit letters in support of his nomination from lawyers who regularly appear before him. It is important to my answer that the Judge asked the lawyers to fax him the letters so that he could send them to the Justice Department for transmittal to the Senate. He did not ask the lawyers to send any letters directly to Washington. Consequently, the Judge would know who submitted letters and what the letters said, as would be obvious to the lawyers.

Now I understand that Senator Hatch recently obtained a letter on this issue from a professor Richard Painter. Professor Painter answers only the question of whether soliciting letters of support violates existing rules of judicial conduct and never mentions the additional fact that Judge Pickering asked for the letters to be sent to him rather than to the Senate. That makes Professor Painter's views much less relevant to the questions I asked.

Furthermore, Professor Painter's analysis seems to be limited to an effort to show that the authorities relied upon by Professor Gillers are not exactly on point and that the standards governing the solicitation of letters of support for nominations are vague. He argues that the rules should be clarified and made more specific. And perhaps he is right about that. But it seems to me to be an insufficiently low standard to set that judges need only make sure they don't clearly violate the ethical rules. We should not want judges who simply avoid clear violations of rules of ethical conduct. We should not want judges who either don't spot ethical issues or treat them as criminal statutes to be parsed and tiptoed around. We should want judges who are beyond reproach, who know that ethical conduct is at the core of their responsibilities, because such conduct helps ensure that the public will respect their decisions. I believe that Judge Pickering's conduct fell far short in this instance.